Xanadu

Xanadu, place in the opium-induced vision that English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge recorded in the poetic fragment “Kubla Khan” (1798). Coleridge’s fantasyland was based on Shangdu (“Upper Capital”), near present-day Duolun in Inner Mongolia, to which the real Kublai Khan moved the seat of Mongol government in the early 1260s.

Coleridge’s name Xanadu persisted in common usage. In Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane (1941), it is the name given to the palatial estate of Charles Foster Kane, the film’s protagonist. Since then the name has been used in many contexts—including songs, a musical, a ballet, and a film—to suggest the idyllic, the luxurious, and the exotic.

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narcotic drug that is obtained from the unripe seedpods of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), a plant of the family Papaveraceae. (See poppy.) Opium is obtained by slightly incising the seed capsules of the poppy after the plant’s flower petals have fallen. The slit seedpods exude a milky...

October 21, 1772 Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England July 25, 1834 Highgate, near London English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of...

poetic fragment by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1816. According to Coleridge, he composed the 54-line work while under the influence of laudanum, a form of opium. Coleridge believed that several hundred lines of the poem had come to him in a dream, but he was able to remember only this...

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Xanadu is an imaginary city in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s mysterious poetic fragment Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream. It is named for a city mentioned in a book by Samuel Purchas, which had been read by Coleridge shortly before the fevered composition of his poem. Though often thought to be completely fictitious, Xanadu has been identified by some scholars to be Shangdu, in what is now the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in northeast China.